A data center is a facility designed to house, maintain, and power a plurality of computer systems. The computer systems within the data center are generally rack-mounted where a number of electronics units are stacked within a support frame.
A conventional Tier 4 data center is designed with 2N+1 redundancy for all power distribution paths. This means that each power distribution component is redundant (2 of each component) plus there is another component added for another layer of redundancy. Essentially, if N is the number of components required for functionality, then 2N would mean you have twice the number of components required. The +1 means not only do you have full redundancy (2N) but you also have a spare, i.e. you can take any component offline and still have full redundancy. With this design you can lose one of the three components but still retain full redundancy in case of failover. Building a Tier 4 data center is cost prohibitive due to the additional power distribution components that must be purchased to provide 2N+1 redundancy for all power distribution paths.
A conventional Tier 2 data center is designed with a single power distribution path with redundant power distribution components. Tier 2 data centers can be built with lower capital expenses but do not offer the same level of redundancy that many businesses running critical systems and applications require.
The described system and method for intelligent data center power management and energy market disaster recovery may employ continuous collection, monitoring and analysis of data from application services, power distribution components, virtual machines, data center facility infrastructure and utility energy markets to enable dynamic data center operation actions for migrating application loads and power loads from one data center to another without the need for manual intervention. The system and method may enable data center and application disaster recovery from utility energy market outages by quickly migrating applications loads from one data center location to another data center location.